Google Sheets AutoCat Regex not being applied - leaving Category blank BP#[A-Za-z]?[0-9][0-9][0-9]+

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I’ve tried everything I can think of and it still does not populate the Transactions sheet Category field.

I inserted a new column, H, the header in line one, Regex, without quotes or leading/trailing spaces.

Placed the word TRUE in column H on the line with the regex expression.

The test for the regex expression works, =REGEXMATCH(B7, “(?i)BP#.?[0-9]{3,}”)

returns TRUE for BP#x5843SHORELINEQPS

Addendum: Changed cell h1 to Description Regex and added new column, put Regex in cell i1, still doesn’t work

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Try removing the (?i) - matching is always case insensitive in AutoCat.
And you only need the one column, Description Regex .
BP#.?[0-9]{3,}
image

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Well, I blew something up and corrupted about 60 records (that I know of) in Transactions, dating back to maybe 2020. Tomorrow I may dump the transaction data and reload from the Excel build I’m migrating from.

No harm, no foul. I should have made a backup of the Sheet build.

Somehow 2 unrelated AutoCat values in the Description Contains column, “PYMT” and “Electronic Withdrawl” were placed in Transactions sheet’s Description fields. My error may have been changing “Description Contains” to “Description Regex” and using the regex in that field.

Unintended consequences.

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With Google Sheets you have the option to restore from version history.
File > Version history

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How cool is that?!?!? Thanks!

In this case I am still using MS Excel in parallel while migrating to Sheets, and will pull that data so everything is exactly the same again. I’ll keep the Excel version going until comfortable I can do what I want in Sheets. So far so good …

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Glad that helps @ghsubs1 . We also have a help article on this here. Thanks @Mark.S for coming to the rescue!

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